New poetry from Stevie Edwards, author of Sadness Workshop

Quiet Armor, the third full-length collection from poet Stevie Edwards, examines how capitalism and patriarchy impact romantic relationships and, more broadly, intimacy. Edwards considers the ways in which confessional performances of vulnerability can be coercive, whether popular culture encourages men to seek validation through sexual excess and aggression, and how we encourage women to be complicit in figurative and literal violence against other women.

Drawing on historical and mythological figures—including Medusa, Persephone, Shakespeare’s Lavinia, Saint Agatha, and Saint Christina—Edwards builds a fierce investigation into how rape culture has shaped the literary canon, academia, and the world at large. She brings readers into the quiet and intimate spaces we create despite trauma—or perhaps even because of it. Ultimately, Quiet Armor seeks to reclaim positive intimacy, showing us not only the desperate battles but also the healing embraces. All the while, these poems ask us: What does the end of rape culture look like? How do we get there?

STEVIE EDWARDS is a lecturer in the Department of English at Clemson University and poetry editor of the South Carolina Review. Her books and chapbooks include Sadness Workshop, Humanly, and Good Grief, and her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

“This exploration of the quiet armor that women wear as they go to war— whether against family expectations, societal norms, political intrusion, abusive men, self-loathing, mental illness, addiction, or sickness—both sings and haunts. It questions the quiet of this armor. It shakes its metal plates, making a fierce and undeniable noise.” —South Florida Poetry Journal

“The poems in Quiet Armor explore the shadows and nuances of one woman teetering between conventional, gendered expectations and witch/martyr/saint/goddess. These poems unfold with improvisational energy, creating an ongoing sense of a life lived, of time passing, of wisdom accrued through experience. It is difficult to write of life’s reparations, especially where love is concerned, without sentimentality. Here, Edwards succeeds, and how: when we reach the end of the last poem, we feel we know the collection’s speaker intimately, and we feel—some of us, anyway—known.” —Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets— -

How does a body protect itself against desire and power and politics? How does a body find ways to remain vulnerable in the America of the twenty-first century? With her latest collection, Quiet Armor, Stevie Edwards uses memories of girlhood and stories of matrimony to answer such difficult questions. This is a book concerned with what it means to live “without a thigh gap,” to have breasts like “two jiggly vanilla pudding cups,” to bleed, to possess a “wound shame.” Saint Agatha, Shakespeare’s Lavinia, the snake-haired Medusa—a host of furious women fill these pages, their funny and vicious voices a shield against the many violences of the world.  —Jehanne Dubrow, author of Wild Kingdom

Stevie Edwards’s Quiet Armor is full of impeccable music, each word and line propelling us forward, through its inventive, honest poems. These poems aren’t just a breakdown of existing in a female body in the twenty-first century—although they do a very fine job of cataloging this—but also offer a lineage and culture which forged this existence in the first place, the overdue and incomplete reckoning of the #MeToo era, and the comfort found in wearing our quiet armor together, that it might yet haunt and heal the future. Edwards has written an unforgettable book. —Lynn Melnick, author of Refusenik— -

Quiet Armor solidifies Stevie Edwards’s position as one of the most audacious writers in American letters. In her third (and sharpest) full-length book, Edwards confronts the swirling pit of our nation’s patriarchy with an alert and mythological ferocity. Each poem is crafted to overthrow its readers’ sense of safety by reminding them of this monstrous fact: the ushers of misogyny are not just men. These poems saunter with poetic attitude fostered by equal parts anguish and tenderness, invoking a radical energy that sings from each line. A careless reader might mistake them for an ambush, but these poems are, indeed, revelations meant to liberate us from the coldest versions of ourselves.  —Rachel McKibbens, author of blud— -